Category: Anthe Building

Last week an amazing thing happened a block away from the Anthe Building (the site of our new headquarters). Workers began removing the ugly brick cladding from a building at the corner of Fourth Street and Scott Boulevard. What was below the brick was a link to our family’s past.

Lucy’s family ran the chain of Grote Drugstores in Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati in the 20th century. They had two stores in Covington. One was at the corner of Pike Street and Madison Ave., what is now The Hannaford, a trendy bar. 

The other store was at Fourth Street and Scott Boulevard. But Jane May nee Grote (Lucy’s mom) couldn’t remember exactly which corner it was on – the area has changed a lot.

On Sunday, Lucy and I visited the construction site at Fourth and Scott. The work had revealed a gorgeous storefront that still had some intact glass. Two windows said “Prescriptions” and one said “Hy-Pure Drugs,” an old brand.

I showed Jane the photos and she confirmed that yup, that was the drugstore her father owned and ran. Jane said she worked the lunch counter there when she was 15 or 16 and would fill in for the employees who were on vacation. The lunch counter was inexpensive, close to the courthouse and a quick place to get a bite.

It also is one block from the Anthe Building. We are thrilled that the drugstore storefront is coming back to life and can’t wait to see what it will be in its next life. 

— Christopher Schwarz

During the last few weeks there has been so much going on at the Anthe Building I don’t know where to start. We are now waiting on permits and inspections (we passed our first electrical inspection last week), so things are at a bit of a lull, which is frustrating and welcome.

Here are some highlights:

HVAC: On and running. I’ve installed humidity monitors throughout the building to get a sense of where we are. The building has never had air conditioning (OK, there was one window unit for all four floors). And we’ve sprayed hundreds of gallons of water to clean the walls and floors. So things are moist. Right now the relative humidity is at 45 percent. That’s OK, but I think/hope we will get it in the 30s, which will be the ideal environment for storing books.

The Floor: For the last couple weeks, the first floor looked like the LAP Chicken Ranch. Our contractor spread five garbage bags of planer shavings to continue soaking up any oil on the floor. It worked (though my neatnik urges were tingling). This week, Megan and I will apply a finish. I’ve been doing adhesion tests with shellac and oil-based varnish to see what combination of finishes will work best for us. Mostly, we’re trying to keep the small amount of remaining oil on the floor off of our shoes. 

Electrical: The electrician removed all the unnecessary conduit and boxes that powered the lathes and mills. Plus they dismantled the dozen fluorescent light fixtures on the first floor from the 1980s. He replaced them with a handful of low-profile LED fixtures. Now we can see the lineshaft in all its glory.

Rough framing: We have some stud walls up for the bathroom and the partition between the storefront and the fulfillment area. But we are waiting for the county’s permission to add drywall (as a firebreak) then the beadboard. Speaking of beadboard, the painter has been painting and glazing ours off-site. We need a lot more beadboard than we salvaged, so the painters are matching the color and the grime from the existing walls.

Upstairs: While we wait for permits and inspections, the crew has dismantled some of the 1970s-era partitions on the second and third floors. This has opened up the space and given us views that are making my brain tick as we plan our future work there.

The elevator: No progress.

The timeline: If our permits and inspections come through this week, we hope to occupy the building in mid-July. That’s a bit optimistic, but that’s how we roll.

— Christopher Schwarz

A couple weeks ago, we received a call from Kathy Porter, daughter of Frank Joseph Anthe. Turns out Kathy is local, and she said she had a picture or two of her father. “Would we like to stop by to see them?” she asked.

Someday I’d love to share my day with Kathy, which was unexpected and so fun. But for now, I want to share these incredible photos, which were over and beyond what I expected.

Above is Kathy’s father, Frank Joseph Anthe, who was born 1901. Everyone in the family and various newspaper clippings say Frank Joseph Anthe took over Anthe Machine Works when was 15-years-old, when his father, Frank D. Anthe, died.

Frank D. Anthe died in 1919, so we assumed his son, Frank Joseph Anthe, took over, perhaps, a few years prior to his father’s death. According to a genealogist Kathy hired in the 1990s, Frank D. Anthe died “of a form of Bright’s Disease, caused by working with iron or lead”. Historically, “Bright’s disease” was used to classify a type of kidney disease, what we now call nephritis.

This genealogy report also included a copy of Frank D. Anthe’s will, written in 1918. In it, he wrote that he wished to give his business, located at 407 Madison Ave., Covington, Kentucky, to his children, and that he wished for his son to continue to operate it as the same. However, he also acknowledged that while he trusted his son to be “thoroughly competent” as he grew older, until his son was 21, he wished for the finances to be handled by executors and trustees, who were instructed, in the meantime, to compensate Frank Joseph Anthe for his work.

So in this picture (which we colorized), we have a teenager or possible early 20-something, whose father had died in 1919, and whose mother had died in 1914, tasked with keeping Anthe Machine Works up and running, the employees who worked there employed and his father’s legacy alive. And he did. Kathy says she remembers her father saying how kind and helpful many locals in the business community were as he transitioned from not just keeping the machines up and running, but also keeping the financials on track, too.

Here are two more early looks at the interior of Anthe Machine Works and its employees. These photos are undated, but Kathy’s dad is the one in the three-piece suit. She said he wore a three-piece to work every day.

Here’s a great shot of the front of Anthe Machine Works, which we also colorized. Again, undated.

Here we have two professionally taken photos that Kathy found tucked in an Anthe Machine Works catalog. One is a sampling of wood cutters made by Anthe and the other is a shot of longtime employee Vic, Kathy said.

“What’s Vic’s last name?” I asked, thinking about past research I had done.

“Schraivogel,” she said pronouncing the name emphatically. I gathered he was a longtime, loved employee.

And then I remembered – the 1975 obituary I found for Victor J. Schraivogel, 69, “a retired machinist for the Anthe Machine Works, Covington, where he was employed for 44 years,” the one I mentioned here. And now, we have this beautiful photo of him!

Kathy says many of her father’s employees worked at Anthe for years. He was a good dad, she said, so he probably was a good boss.

(And again, for more views of Anthe cutters and catalogs, check out this video, by Jason French, curator at Behringer-Crawford Museum.)

I’m throwing this photo in just because it’s fun. In a 1980 brochure called “Take a Tankquilizer,” there is an article titled, “CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! Went The Street Car OOGA! OOGA! OOGA! Went The Horn.” The article says, “The operator of this #1 street car and some of the spectators on the side walk seem concerned. All but the driver of the car. He seems to have a good grip on the wheel and his sights set straight ahead. Any ideas of the place, time, and people involved? Submit information to TANK Marketing Department and receive your next ride on #1 or any other TANK route of your choice, ‘FREE.’”

I have no additional information to share except that’s the Anthe building in the background and the scene gives a wonderful sense of time and place, decades ago.

Speaking of the 1980s, here we have Donald Anthe posing in the same spot as his father did all those years ago.

And here’s what the interior of Anthe Machine Works looked like in 1987.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

Work at the Anthe Building is plowing forward with a few necessary diversions and delays. As of now, we hope to begin fulfillment operations on June 15. Our new fulfillment employees start on June 1, so they likely will join our efforts to get the building ready and help install the packing tables and shelving.

There are things to celebrate: We have a paved driveway. The concrete is curing, so we can’t drive on it. But it rises gently and exactly to the shop floor. Also, the HVAC system is completely installed and awaiting electricity.

There are setbacks: The “walls” at the front of the building were not stable enough to keep as-is. The walls were only beadboard that was nailed to other pieces of beadboard until the whole shebang was somewhat sturdy. No studs or plates or headers. In fact, it was the frames for the doors and windows that kept everything steady.

So we took down these partitions. We are going to build stud walls and cover them with painted beadboard. So the end result will look much the same, but will be up to code.

Some revelations: Almost all of the architectural features inside the building are salvaged material. (This makes me happy.) None of the interior transom windows match. And some of the partitions on the second floor are clearly from another building. 

We are keeping all of the salvaged items. We are cleaning them up and will reuse them throughout the building, keeping in the spirit of the building’s history.

Finally, the contractors dealt with “the trench.” The trench is an enclosed empty space between our building and the pawn shop next door. (These two buildings were both part of the original Anthe business.) The trench allows light and air into the south wall of the building. It also was filled with decades of trash and debris.

The contractors cleared the trench and unclogged the drain at the bottom, which was filled with decades of silt.

Coming soon: A new accessible (ADA) bathroom, which will be built to look like it belongs in the building. And replacement steel doors for the back entrance.

— Christopher Schwarz